It’s a great day for good news!

I had my thyroid bloodwork and neck ultrasound this week to check my tumor markers and see what’s up. My TSH was surprisingly low — I say surprising because I’ve gained weight over the last year and usually weight has an impact on the dosage, and yet, it was even lower than my last appointment. As a refresher, the higher the dose the lower the TSH. Low TSH means hyperthyroid levels, and while this can help suppress tissue (in my case tumor) growth it can also lead to long-term problems like osteoporosis, heart issues, and other uncomfortable symptoms like heat/cold intolerance, bulging eyes, and weight gain (especially in the gut area).

Although my doctor did not say to change the dose, I may take it upon myself to take a half a pill once a week every other week. The half-life is about a week, so it won’t be drastically noticeable but I think it might take the edge off, so to speak. Western medicine suggests I keep my TSH at or just below 0.1, but I’m at 0.03. Normal, optimal TSH would be around 2.2. But we shall see where the wind takes me.

With my TSH down, my tumor markers are also down! Not 0 but notably down. And when my doctor did the ultrasound we couldn’t find the suspicious tumors anymore. There was one near my esophagus and then just generally in my neck on the left side but she could only see normal looking lymph nodes this time around. Of course the non-zero tumor markers suggest some amount of microscopic tissue, but boy is this exciting.

My doctor was like, “I don’t really know. We just had those blips, but now things are looking clear.” I wanted to be like, yes blips that I have dedicated my life to understanding and healing.

I’m thrilled for these results obvious reasons, but I’m doubly thrilled because it means that all of my health rabbit holes have been paying off. It means that I did not need surgery to shrink my tumors. It means that everything I hold to be true about health, healing, and wellness does in fact seem to hold true.

It didn’t take perfection, goodness knows I’ve got a host of other physical ills that I’m working on right now (an inflamed achilles, poor cardio health, and lack of muscle overall) and I’ve been much more relaxed about my food choices (for better or worse). Instead it seems the core of healing is rooted in being present. To my emotions, the energy in my body, how my environment impacts me (including who I’m talking to, what I’m watching/reading, what I’m eating). It has been in slowly but surely staying present to old patterns long enough to behave just a little differently each time.

For me, it’s been about speaking up, in both big and small ways. Hence my Substack, hence my dreams of speaking on stages near and far, hence my continued attempts at boundaries, hence starting to write, well several, books.

I deeply believe our own bodies hold the key to our own health and well-being. It’s a bit of a broken-record claim in the self-healing world. And yet, I think it’s true. When we don’t honor our experience exactly as it is, our body has to compensate. Some concrete examples from my own life: trying not to cry at a movie (even though I’m at home and can absolutely cry, but who wants to cry?), saying yes to making some social media graphics despite being utterly burned out on design work, and trying to get work done even when I’m so sleepy and brain foggy. It forces our systems to go into overdrive — whether doling out dopamine, cortisol, or just stuffing down all of the mechanisms of sadness, that’s a lot of redirected energy.

It’s a lot like filling a bottle with small pieces of paper and then you just keep cramming more and more papers in there. There always seems to be a little bit of give and you just shove it in there, but really it was full a long time ago. This goes on for many pieces of paper until finally one more doesn’t fit and some of the papers come springing back out. and then all of the smashed papers start to fold open and it just keeps springing back out. Or at least this is the visual I get. I suppose you could also think of it like shoving a spring into a can.

And for as much as a part of you might be terrified of facing all of your deep buried everything, let me remind you that no matter what it is you’ve already experienced it before — you’ve already been holding it. Even the most traumatic experiences are in the past. Your body might not know that yet, but the worst is over. I firmly believe it is always possible to feel better. Not in a striving kind of way, just in a deep-seated sense that nothing is forever. Nothing is impossible because everything we know is impossibly miraculous.

I hope you’ll pause to listen to the messages your own body and life are trying to tell you. I hope you’ll take your aches and pains, physical and spiritual, as invitations rather than numbing them away. I hope you’ll not take any diagnosis as the end of the line. Anything is possible.

I’m still on a 6 month schedule of checking bloodwork/ultrasound monitoring, but after my next appointment in October, we might decide to move to once a year check-in’s. It’s actually amazing to think how many years its been since my initial diagnosis. Sitting in my doctor’s office yesterday I felt distinctly older than I remember feeling at past appointments. Not in an “argh I can feel my age” creaky-knees kind of way. Maybe in more of a settled way. Trusting the process.

Of course, I had a moment while brushing my teeth yesterday where I thought, “my doctor hasn’t released my tumor marker results to me yet, what if they skyrocketed and she wants to tell me in person?!?!?!” And proceeded to feel anxious for 20 more minutes until I decided that only I get to decide what I think. I landed on, “What if my tumor markers are so low she can’t even believe it and wants to tell me that in person?” Not ten minutes later I got my tumor markers on MyChart and they were low. So touche. We really do get to create our universe, but not in a supernatural way. We get to choose what thoughts we believe, and doesn’t that fundamentally mean we can create anything we want? (**want being the operative word. It’s more like anything we want that also aligns with what soul journey we’re on that’s meant for us, hah!)

It all starts to sound woo-woo, but if I’ve learned nothing else over the last nearly 8 years of cancering it’s that the chance to know yourself as a human being beneath all of the labels and expectations and traumas, reveals life as a miracle. I think woo-woo might just be code for human. Woo-woo honors the kind of relationship we’ve been systematically conditioned out of. So the next time you balk at something woo-woo, maybe pause to ask yourself what it is that you’re balking it. Can you identify what part of you is having that reaction? Whose voice it sounds like? What you’re trying to protect?

At risk of being pedantic I’m offering that reflection because my own experience with healing is one that I think invites some amount of skepticism now. Which is honestly uncomfortable for me, because there’s nothing I love more than being liked and understood. But such is my path in this lifetime. Trailblazing uncertainty! So let’s celebrate my lack of visible tumors! I hope you’ll go do something fun that maybe 5th grade you would think is super dope. I think that might be what life is all about.